This Algorithm Tests The Strength Of Your Relationship

A friendship network, with various clusters. Awkwardly, the person's ex had a "stronger" relationship than the person's current partner.
Dataclysm.org
Mathematician and OKCupid founder Christian Rudder and his team have written an online application that analyzes your Facebook network to predict the strength of your relationships.

"The graph assigns weight to relationships, so 'cliques' of friends will cluster together. You can mouse over to see people's names," the app says.

As lives become enmeshed, social networks do, too. The broader your connections, the stronger your relationship.
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In his book, Rudder writes that a relationship involves the merger of two lives, and that by analyzing the "embeddedness" of the couple's social networks you can measure the depth of their integration and the strength of their relationship.

"Research from a variety of sources (emails, IM, telephone) has shown that the more mutual friends two people share, the stronger their relationship. More connections imply more time together, more common interest, and more stability," Rudder writes.

However, the algorithm Rudder and his team developed measures more than just the number of common connections; it measures the number of clusters of friends you have in common.

A partner's social connections visualized within a person's broader social network.
Dataclysm.org
According to the team, the more separate friend groups a couple has in common — from work to high school to family and college friends — the more embedded the relationship is.

Data networks that show clusters of connected friend groups, like Facebook, are vital to performing this type of analysis.

"For relationships, and romantic relationships specifically, this data has enabled a new, powerful measure of how strong a bond between two people is," Rudder writes. "It turns out your lives should not just be intertwined, but intertwined in a specific way."